Comment on Noob question about PiHole

nul9o9@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• rambos@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Afaik there is no primary and secondary, you cant tell which one to use. Its best to have 2 piholes, but having 2nd DNS set to nextdns or something like that should be fine if you cant run 2 instances, probably not the best setup tho

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• mateomaui@reddthat.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I have two piholes, and sometimes both will receive requests at the same time, if there’s a lot of traffic.

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  • Rootiest@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah this is what I do.

    Putting Cloudflare as my secondary would allow some requests to get through and then often the device whose requests went to Cloudflare would continue using Cloudflare for a while.

    The best solution I found was to run a second Pihole and use it as the secondary.

    You can use something like orbital sync to keep them syncronized

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    • mateomaui@reddthat.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Pretty much. Not sure how the router determines which DNS to use, but mine seems to latch onto whichever one serves up results the fastest, which would inevitably be cloudflare direct when the pihole returns a block.

      So I use a Raspberry Pi Zero W as a dedicated pihole, and my Pi 4 seedbox acts as its own pihole for torrents and as redundant backup when the Zero is rebooting or whatever. And then use gravity-sync from the Zero to the 4 to mirror the settings.

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      • Rootiest@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Another cool trick is using tailscale to ensure your portable devices always can access your Pihole(s) from anywhere and then setting those tailscale addresses as your DNS servers in tailscale.

        This way you can always use your DNS from anywhere, even on cell data or on public networks

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• AtariDump@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  When it comes to a “secondary”DNS… there is nothing like a primary and secondary DNS server. These indications are quite misleading but many systems adopted it this way. Pihole only list the DNS servers as primary and secondary, because this is what the providers write on their pages. The bad phrasing is supported especially by how Windows handles it.

  Most operating systems implement DNS servers as alternatives, not as fallbacks, i.e. they will query any of both servers from time to time, so it is quite likely that you will loose your Pi-hole filtering capabilities (at least partially) [if you specify a secondary DNS server on your network].

  The ONLY DNS server you should have set on your network is a/the PiHole(s).

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  • nul9o9@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Thanks for the clarification. I’ll be updating my settings.

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